CFP: *Workshop on Methods and Evaluation in Interdisciplinary
Computer/Human Interaction Conference, 2007
San Jose, CA
Research into new forms of sociality or critical applications of
technology often requires unexpected and even disjunctive institutional
partnerships. Universities in particular find researchers coming
together around common resources or initiatives who share little in the
way of methods, values, or politics.
How are researchers and practitioners from Art/Design and the Sciences
negotiating and sustaining collaboration today? What differences are
preserved in the process, which ones obscured, which transcended? When
have quantitative and qualitative methodologies successfully co-mingled,
and what do the adherents of each have to learn? Aren't disharmonious
partnerships more likely to be formed in a climate of decreased
resources and increased pressure to demonstrate "creativity" that
This April in San Jose at the annual Computer/Human Interaction (CHI)
Conference, we'll be conducting a workshop on these subjects for a day,
and we're eager to enlist some more participants. The workshop will take
the form of short presentations, large and small-group discussions, with
representatives present from many disciplines.
The context, if you're new to CHI, is a professional conference based
predominantly in scientific discourse. We've proposed this workshop to
CHI as an interdisciplinary team from art and science, and indeed the
conference has seen an increasing amount of designers and artists in
We'll be focusing on the following specific questions and topics:
1 - How are projects evaluated by interdisciplinary teams? Which
criteria from which constituencies are applied, and to what ends?
2 - What methods of investigation are employed in design processes by
teams composed of diverse practitioners? How are ideas iterated?
3 - When is labor divided based on disciplinary difference? At what
stages in the process are these differences ignored?
4 - When is evaluation and critique incorporated into process, and how?
If your research or practice has led you to navigation of these or
related questions, we invite you to submit proposals for participation
and presentation at this Spring's workshop, on April 27th in San Jose.
Please see the full CFP for more a more detailed explication of this
We hope to assemble a group capable of producing applicable methods and
useful processes in the pursuit of research that is interdisciplinary by
necessity, and perhaps not by choice.
DEADLINE: January 12, 2007
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
RELATED LINKS (precedent at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)